In my book, The Body Of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design I list very many examples of the sort of design only a fool would produce - examples of sub-optimal compromises in structures and processes that could have been less error-prone and more efficient in terms of resource use or function.
These also included vestigial structures and system that still exist, sometime causing problems such as appendicitis when the functionless appendix becomes infected, and the wasted metabolism in making all the tiny hairs on your body stand up in cold weather using the tiny arrector pili muscles and the autonomic nerves that supply them.
Now we have another example, involving the superior and posterior auricular muscles that once moved the ears in a remote simian ancestor, but now only serve as party tricks for the few of us that can wiggle our ears.
Moult remains of feather-feeding beetle larvae intimately associated with downy feather portions from an unidentified theropod dinosaur in Early Cretaceous amber of Spain. Insets show the head with powerful mandibles of one of the larval moults (top) and the pigmentation pattern of feather second order branches (bottom), with the main stem of one feather at the right of the amber fragment. The length of the amber fragment is 6 millimetres across.
Isolated moult of the feather-feeding beetle larva found in the Spanish amber outcrop of Rábago/El Soplao, with detail of its powerful mandibles (right). Length of the moult is less than two millimetres.
Image credit: CN IGME-CSIC.
To normal people, the discovery of feather-eating beetles and feather fragments in 105-million-year-old amber, 30 million years before there were birds might be a clue that something had feathers before bird had them, suggesting that birds might have evolved from whatever that was.
Not so, creationists, however. Creationists conclude that any evidence that doesn't agree with them must be wrong because their evidence-free dogma is sacred and therefore uninfluenced by real-world evidence.
So, the following is just something else for creationists to ignore while they pretend to know better than the experts who have, unlike creationists, actually studied the subject.
It is news that a study, co-led between the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain of the Spanish National Research Council (CN IGME-CSIC) and Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) has shown that beetles fed on the feathers of dinosaurs about 105 million years ago. This is based on an analysis of spectacular fossil amber fragments, from the locality of San Just in north-eastern Spain, revealed moults of tiny beetle larvae tightly surrounded by portions of downy feathers.
The feathers belonged to an unknown theropod dinosaur that lived around 105 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous. This means that the feathers could not have come from a ‘modern bird’ species, since current evidence indicates that this group appeared about 30 million years later in the fossil record, during the Late Cretaceous.
Scientists from Oxford and Birmingham Universities have uncovered hundreds of tracks of different sorts of dinosaur in a quarry in North Oxfordshire, and, unlike those in the Paluxy Riverbed, Texas, USA, no-one has carved human footprints in amongst them to fool tourists.
Amongst the tracks are five distinct trackways, the longest of which is 150 meters. Sadly for creationists, we can be sure there will not be any human footprints in the same rock formation because these tracks were made around 166 million years ago when the earliest mammals hadn't diversified even into simians, let alone the African apes.
An artist’s rendering shows how Ahvaytum bahndooiveche may have appeared in a habitat dating to around 230 million years ago.
Illustration by Gabriel Ugueto
A University of Wisconsin Geology Museum field crew is seen here in 2016 prospecting for additional material at the site in Wyoming where fossils of Ahvaytum bahndooiveche were discovered in 2013. The researchers are Aaron Kufner (left) and Jennifer Lien.
The thing about science that distinguishes it from religion is the willingness to change its collective mind when the facts change. This is because science is led by the fact wherever they lead
Science is reasonable uncertainty religion is unreasonable certainty. Religion appeals to those who value certainty over truth, whereas science appeals to those who value truth above certainty.
And scientists have just changed their collective minds about where and when the first dinosaurs appeared.
The consensus had been that they first appeared on the southern end of the supercontinent Pangea before it split into Gondwana in the South and Laurasia in the north and only spread to Laurasia millions of years later.
What can you tell me about the ancient reptile, Ahvaytum bahndooiveche, and its place in the evolution of dinosaurs?
Ahvaytum bahndooiveche is a recently identified dinosaur species from the Late Triassic period, approximately 230 million years ago, discovered in what is now Wyoming, USA. This species is notable for being the oldest known dinosaur from the ancient northern supercontinent Laurasia, challenging previous beliefs that dinosaurs originated solely in the southern supercontinent Gondwana.
Discovery and Naming
The fossil remains of Ahvaytum bahndooiveche were uncovered in 2013 at the Garrett's Surprise locality within the Popo Agie Formation in Wyoming. The genus name "Ahvaytum" translates to "long ago," and the species name "bahndooiveche" means "water's young handsome man," a term used by the Eastern Shoshone to refer to both dinosaurs and colorful native salamanders. This naming honors the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, whose ancestral lands include the discovery site, and reflects a collaborative effort between researchers and Indigenous communities.
Physical Description Ahvaytum bahndooiveche was a small dinosaur, estimated to be about 3 feet (0.91 meters) in length and 1 foot (0.30 meters) in height, comparable in size to a modern chicken but with a notably long tail. The fossil material includes fragmentary hindlimb bones, such as an isolated left astragalus and a partial left femur, suggesting it had progressed beyond the juvenile stage and was still slowly growing.
Evolutionary Significance
This discovery has significant implications for our understanding of dinosaur evolution. Prior to this find, it was believed that dinosaurs originated in Gondwana and later dispersed to Laurasia. The existence of Ahvaytum bahndooiveche in Laurasia during the same period as the earliest known southern dinosaurs indicates that dinosaurs were more widely distributed across the globe earlier than previously thought. This challenges the hypothesis of a delayed dinosaurian dispersal out of high-latitude Gondwana and suggests a more complex scenario for the early evolution and distribution of dinosaurs.
In summary, Ahvaytum bahndooiveche provides valuable insights into the early stages of dinosaur evolution, highlighting a broader and more rapid dispersal of these creatures across ancient Earth than was previously understood.
The Grand Canyon often features in creationist disinformation websites because it needs to be explained away in terms of a history of Earth lasting only some 6-10,000 years and because it is easy to fool people who want to be fooled that it is somehow evidence if a global flood, and in particular how the water in the alleged flood ran away. Cult frauds also pretend the different rock layers in the canyon wall can all be explained in terms of sediment deposited during their god's supposed genocidal flood.
The truth, as usual with creationist claims, is nothing like the childish myth they like to pretend is real history. In fact, the walls of the Grand Canyon are a record of plate tectonics and climate change over hundreds of millions of years and mesh completely with what is known of Earth's history from other sources.
An indication of how creationists cult leaders are terrified of the information in the walls of the Grand Canyon, can be gauged from the notorious creationist purveyor of disinformation, Andrew Snelling's article on the creationists disinformation site, Answers in Genesis and the lengths he went to to obtain sample without disclosing exactly where he got them from, as related in this article in science. Snelling argued that it discriminated against his religion to require him to provide GPS coordinates of his samples! Clearly, Snelling believes his religion requires his 'science' to lack precision and reproducibility in case someone else tried to replicate his measurements and finds his to be bogus.
Snelling was subsequently given permission to collect samples under supervision and then wrote up his findings to try to explain away the fact that his findings didn't conform to his YEC preconceptions. His excuses include the creationists go-to excuse - the unsubstantiated claim that the uniformly old age of the rock he obtained must be because radioactive decay rates used to be different by several orders of magnitude!
One of Snellings stated objectives was to prove that the deformed Tapeats sandstone deposits, which he assures his readers are not fractured, despite the fact that photographs show fractures, were soft when deformed. He mentions this early in his article but then quietly drops the subject, presumably because his findings contradict his claim.
Clearly, it is important to creationist cult leaders that their dupes are badly misinformed about the date of the rocks in the walls of the Grand Canyon, and it is obvious why, as this paper by geologists from Utah State University, together with colleagues from the University of New Mexico, Boise State University, Idaho, the University of Las Vegas, Nevada and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Denver, Colorado, shows. The rocks at the bottom of the canyon are from the Cambrian, 540 million years before creationists dogma says Earth was made from nothing by magic.
Other rocks map exactly onto what is known of changes in sea level and climate due to plate tectonics and how the canyon itself was carved into those strata is fully explainable in terms of erosion by a river flowing over a river bed that was rising slowly due to forces beneath Earth's crust over a period of millions of years.
Perhaps the most embarrassing thing for creationists is the thing they normally avoid like the plague - the famous Horseshoe bend, which requires their credulous dupes to believe a raging torrent of water, for no apparent reason, changed direction by over 180 degrees and headed back the way it came, when raging torrents of water are notoriously uni-directional.
And why on Earth anyone would imagine the water from a global flood would flow through a canyon in the middle of North America into the Pacific Ocean is anyone's guess and not something Andrew Snelling or any other creationist apologist has ever attempted to explain, simply leaving it to their parochial and culturally chauvinistic dupes to assume that anything important that happened in world history must have happened in the USA.
It's another of those 'non-existent' transitional fossils days that come round several times a month, as scientists find yet another fossil which is clearly of an intermediate species between two different taxons.
Today's example is of an intermediate or stem species from which horseshoe crabs, spiders and scorpions evolved. It lived about 450 million years before there was an Earth for it to live on, according to creationists superstition, which believe Earth was created by magic as a small flat planet with a dome over it between 6 and 10,000 years ago.
With so much of Earth history occurring before creationism's little god allegedly created a small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East, it's useful to be able to recover data on global events such as climate change and sea temperature changes that can be projected into the future to predict what changes we can expect.
The 'El Niño' is a climate phenomenon that has a profound effect on world climate. It occurs every 2-7 years and is characterized by a warming of the sea surface in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. It changes ocean currents, atmospheric humidity and rainfall, and jet streams that drive weather patterns, so understanding when these events occurred in the past and mapping them onto known climate patterns can help us predict future weather patterns.
Now scientist at the University of Arizona have developed a model for predicting how El Niño affects global weather patterns which needs to be validated against actual data, so they have analyzed the record of sea temperature change recorded in deposits of tiny foraminifera shells in ocean sediment, going back to the last Ice Age, 10,000 years before creationists think Earth existed.
Of course, the reason was not to refute creationism - it does that incidentally - but to provide a longer history on which to base future predictions than are currently available.
Today's routine refutation of creationism comes in the form of an article about the pygmy fauna on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, that, along with similar pygmy fauna on other Mediterranean islands, was probably exterminated by early modern humans 3,000 - 4,000 years before the mythical 'Creation Week'.
The article is by Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Node Leader in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures, Flinders University; Christian Reepmeyer, Deputy Director - Oceania, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut - German Archaeological Institute, and Theodora Moutsiou, Special Scientist, University of Cyprus, published in The Conversation. It is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
But first a little background to the Mediterranean island pygmy fauna:
In that strange logic that passes for rational thought in creationist circles, creationists will tell you that the 'fact' that coelacanths haven't changed for millions of years 'proves' the Theory of Evolution is false. Also, the 'fact' that scientists used to think coelacanths were extinct until one was caught, 'proves' science is all wrong, so Earth is only a few thousand years old [sic].
But of course, as with every other 'proof' of creationism, the 'facts' presented are in fact lies, intelligently designed by cult leaders to appeal to the child-like minds of creationists desperate for real-world evidence for their inherited superstition.
Firstly, coelacanths are not a species but a family consisting of several genera and they have changed over the millions of years between the most recent fossil and today and in its heyday, there were over 175 known species so far identified in the fossil record.
Secondly, the fact that scientists thought the entire family was extinct was simply based on the sudden disappearance of them in the fossil record and the fact that no living specimens had been seen - until one was caught. Scientists then changed their minds because the facts changed. The 'extinction' of the coelacanths was not a central part of the Theory of Evolution.
In that vast amount of time before creationism's god allegedly created a small flat planet with a dome over it, containing nothing and nowhere that wasn't known to the Bronze Age Canaanite pastoralists who first wrote about it, when 99.9975% of Earth’s history happened, there were swarms of trilobites living in the seas and regularly molting to leave hard body parts to fossilise in the marine sediment.
They did this so frequently that trilobites are now amongst the commonest of fossils, but nevertheless fossils preserving the soft body parts are rare, like the soft body parts of the rest of the Cambrian biota.
However, just such a fossil has turned up in upstate New York that shows something surprising - it has an additional pair of legs to the usual trilobite complement. This discovery is the subject of a paper in the journal Palaeontology (the journal of the Palaeontological Association) by Jin-Bo Hou from Nanjing University and Professor Melanie Hopkins, curator and chair of the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Paleontology. The discovery is described in an American Natural History Museum news article:
Creationists have been fooled by their cult into believe several absurdities concerning Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution.
The first is that the study of evolution consists of learning what Charles Darwin wrote in 1859, as though he was some sort of infallible prophet, in much the same way that religious people learn their religion by studying copies of ancient manuscripts and the writings of venerated early theologians.
The second is that the Theory of Evolution (TEO) is all about the fossil record.
The third is that Darwin claimed a whole series of intermediate fossils would be found for every evolved species, so it follows that any 'missing' fossils are failures of the Theory of Evolution and are fatal to the theory.
Charles Darwin of course was primarily a biologist, not a geologist so his understanding of the fossil record was based on observation, not necessarily on an understanding of the processes of fossilisation and why they are rare. No-one in their right mind would imagine there is some fundamental law at work which requires every generation of every evolving species to deposit a fossil where it can easily be found, and Darwin never made any claim about such unbroken series existing, only that fossils would conform to the theory that species have evolved over time.
But the gaps in the fossil record are largely irrelevant today anyway, since the fossil record is mere confirmation of the TOE, just as Darwin predicted, while the major supporting evidence comes from genetic evidence of which Darwin knew nothing, the nested hierarchies of cladistics which is the morphological evidence, biogeography which shows distribution patterns as the TOE predicts, embryology which 'reruns' evolution such as the beginnings of gills in mammalian embryos and the same sequences of cell specialisations in distantly related species.
What is the main evidence for the Theory of Evolution?
The Theory of Evolution is supported by a wide range of evidence from various scientific disciplines. The main categories of evidence for evolution include:
Fossil Record
The fossil record provides a chronological catalog of life on Earth. Fossils show a gradual change in species over time, including the appearance of transitional forms that bridge gaps between major groups of organisms. For example, the transition from fish to amphibians is well-documented by fossils such as Tiktaalik, which shows features of both fish and tetrapods.
Fossils also show patterns of extinction and the emergence of new species, supporting the idea of descent with modification over millions of years.
Comparative Anatomy
The study of anatomical structures reveals similarities between different species that suggest a common ancestry. For example, the forelimbs of humans, whales, birds, and bats have different functions (grasping, swimming, flying), but they share a common skeletal structure, known as homologous structures, indicating they evolved from a common ancestor.
Vestigial structures, like the human appendix or the pelvic bones in whales, are remnants of features that were functional in an ancestor but are now reduced or repurposed, further supporting evolutionary change over time.
Genetics and Molecular Biology
DNA and molecular evidence provide some of the most compelling evidence for evolution. All living organisms use DNA as the hereditary material, and many genes are conserved across species. For instance, humans share about 98-99% of their DNA with chimpanzees, suggesting a recent common ancestor.
Molecular clocks, which measure the rate of genetic mutations over time, help trace the evolutionary timeline and relationships between species.
The presence of "junk" DNA and shared genetic sequences (such as pseudogenes) among related species suggests a common origin.
Biogeography
The geographic distribution of species provides evidence for evolution. Similar species are often found in regions that were once connected or are separated by barriers that limit gene flow, such as oceans or mountain ranges.
The distinct species found on islands, such as the finches on the Galápagos Islands studied by Charles Darwin, evolved from a common ancestor and adapted to different environments, illustrating adaptive radiation.
Embryology
The study of embryos shows that related species often go through similar stages of development. For example, vertebrate embryos (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals) all have pharyngeal pouches and tails at some stage, which reflects their common ancestry.
Differences that arise later in development correspond to the adaptations of each species, supporting the idea of descent with modification.
Direct Observation of Evolutionary Processes
Evolution can be observed directly in nature and laboratories. Examples include the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, pesticide resistance in insects, and changes in beak shapes of finches in response to environmental changes.
Artificial selection, such as the breeding of dogs or crops, also demonstrates how selection pressures can lead to rapid changes in species over relatively short periods.
Radiometric Dating
Radiometric dating methods, such as carbon dating and uranium-lead dating, provide estimates of the age of fossils and geological formations. These methods help place fossils within a timeframe consistent with the evolutionary timeline, confirming that older fossils belong to simpler organisms, while younger fossils show more complex life forms.
Phylogenetics
The study of evolutionary relationships through phylogenetic trees, constructed based on genetic, morphological, and biochemical data, helps map the evolutionary history of species. These trees show how species diverged from common ancestors and how closely or distantly related they are.
Conclusion
These lines of evidence, taken together, provide a comprehensive framework that supports the Theory of Evolution. Each category of evidence converges to confirm that all species are related through common descent and have evolved over time through natural processes like mutation, natural selection, genetic drift, and gene flow.
Creationists claim there is no evidence for 'macro-evolution'. Is this claim valid?
The claim by creationists that there is "no evidence for macro-evolution" is not valid according to the scientific consensus. Scientists define "macro-evolution" as large-scale evolutionary changes that occur over long periods, leading to the emergence of new species, genera, families, and higher taxonomic groups. This process involves the accumulation of genetic changes that eventually result in speciation — the splitting of one species into two or more distinct species.
Here is why the claim that there is no evidence for macro-evolution is not supported:
Fossil Record
Transitional Fossils: The fossil record contains numerous examples of transitional forms that demonstrate macro-evolutionary changes. These fossils show intermediate characteristics between different groups of organisms. Notable examples include:
Tiktaalik: A transitional form between fish and early amphibians, showing both fish-like features (fins, scales) and tetrapod-like features (a neck, wrist bones).
Bird Evolution: Fossils like Archaeopteryx and Microraptor show traits of both non-avian dinosaurs and birds, documenting the evolution of birds from theropod dinosaurs.
Mammalian Evolution: The transition from reptiles to mammals is well-documented with fossils such as Cynognathus and Morganucodon, showing the gradual evolution of mammalian features such as a differentiated jaw and specialized teeth.
Human Evolution: Fossils such as Australopithecus afarensis ("Lucy") and Homo habilis demonstrate the gradual transition from early primates to modern humans, showing changes in brain size, bipedalism, and tool use.
Genetics and Molecular Evidence
Genomic Data: DNA evidence strongly supports macro-evolution. For example, comparisons of genomes between different species show patterns of genetic similarity that correspond with evolutionary relationships. Humans share a significant percentage of their DNA with other primates, such as chimpanzees (98-99%), suggesting a common ancestor.
Endogenous Retroviruses (ERVs): Certain retroviruses integrate into the host genome, and these viral sequences can be inherited. ERVs are found in the same locations across the genomes of related species, which would be highly unlikely unless they shared a common ancestor.
Gene Duplication and Diversification: Macroevolution is supported by observations of gene duplication, where new genes can evolve new functions, leading to the development of novel traits and the divergence of species over time.
Observed Speciation Events
Speciation in Real-Time: There are numerous documented cases of speciation (the formation of new species) occurring in nature, especially in organisms with short generation times. Examples include:
Cichlid Fish in African Lakes: These fish have diversified into hundreds of species with distinct characteristics in a relatively short period.
Polyploidy in Plants: Many new plant species have arisen through polyploidy, where an organism gains extra sets of chromosomes, creating reproductive barriers with the parent species.
Apple Maggot Flies (Rhagoletis pomonella): This insect species has been observed to split into distinct populations based on host plant preference, a process that could lead to speciation.
Comparative Anatomy and Embryology
Homologous Structures: Similarities in bone structures, like the limbs of vertebrates, indicate common ancestry. The differences between these structures have accumulated over time, leading to macro-evolutionary changes.
Developmental Biology: Embryonic development patterns often reveal similarities across species that are not apparent in adult forms. For instance, the presence of gill-like structures in the embryos of vertebrates (including humans) suggests a common origin with fish.
Phylogenetic Evidence
Evolutionary Trees: Phylogenetic trees constructed using genetic, morphological, and biochemical data consistently show that species have diverged from common ancestors. These trees reflect branching patterns predicted by macro-evolutionary theory.
Mechanisms for Large-Scale Evolutionary Change
The mechanisms that drive microevolution (small-scale changes within species) — such as mutation, natural selection, genetic drift, and gene flow — are the same processes that, over extended periods, result in macro-evolutionary changes. There is no scientific barrier that separates microevolution from macroevolution; rather, macroevolution is the accumulation of many microevolutionary changes.
Conclusion
The claim that there is "no evidence for macro-evolution" reflects a misunderstanding or rejection of the broad range of scientific evidence supporting the process. The fossil record, genetic data, observed speciation events, comparative anatomy, and phylogenetic studies all provide robust evidence for macro-evolution. In science, macroevolution is a well-established process, substantiated by multiple independent lines of evidence from different fields.
In actual fact, Chares Darwin accepted that the fossil record was at best gappy with:
One other consideration is worth notice: with animals and plants that can propagate rapidly and are not highly locomotive, there is reason to suspect, as we have formerly seen, that their varieties are generally at first local; and that such local varieties do not spread widely and supplant their parent-forms until they have been modified and perfected in some considerable degree. According to this view, the chance of discovering in a formation in any one country all the early stages of transition between any two forms, is small, for the successive changes are supposed to have been local or confined to some one spot. Most marine animals have a wide range; and we have seen that with plants it is those which have the widest range, that oftenest present varieties; so that with shells and other marine animals, it is probably those which have had the widest range, far exceeding the limits of the known geological formations of Europe, which have oftenest given rise, first to local varieties and ultimately to new species; and this again would greatly lessen the chance of our being able to trace the stages of transition in any one geological formation.
It should not be forgotten, that at the present day, with perfect specimens for examination, two forms can seldom be connected by intermediate varieties and thus proved to be the same species, until many specimens have been collected from many places; and in the case of fossil species this could rarely be effected by palaeontologists.
We shall, perhaps, best perceive the improbability of our being enabled to connect species by numerous, fine, intermediate, fossil links, by asking ourselves whether, for instance, geologists at some future period will be able to prove, that our different breeds of cattle, sheep, horses, and dogs have descended from a single stock or from several aboriginal stocks; or, again, whether certain sea-shells inhabiting the shores of North America, which are ranked by some conchologists as distinct species from their European representatives, and by other conchologists as only varieties, are really varieties or are, as it is called, specifically distinct. This could be effected only by the future geologist discovering in a fossil state numerous intermediate gradations; and such success seems to me improbable in the highest degree.
Geological research, though it has added numerous species to existing and extinct genera, and has made the intervals between some few groups less wide than they otherwise would have been, yet has done scarcely anything in breaking down the distinction between species, by connecting them together by numerous, fine, intermediate varieties; and this not having been effected, is probably the gravest and most obvious of all the many objections which may be urged against my views.
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (p. 159). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.
From that concluding paragraph, it is obvious that Darwin was less worried about the perceived gaps than about how they would be used to discredit his theory.
And now a team of researchers from Utrecht, Netherlands and Liverpool, UK, have shown that the gaps in the fossil records are not an unsurmountable problem for the TOE because they can easily be bridged with other evidence. Their findings are the subject of a recent paper in BMC Ecology and Evolution and a news release from Utrecht University:
Darwin’s fear was unjustified: writing evolutionary history by bridging the gapsFossils are used to reconstruct evolutionary history, but not all animals and plants become fossils and many fossils are destroyed before we can find them (e.g., the rocks that contain the fossils are destroyed by erosion). As a result, the fossil record has gaps and is incomplete, and we’re missing data that we need to reconstruct evolutionary history. Now, a team of sedimentologists and stratigraphers from the Netherlands and the UK examined how this incompleteness influences the reconstruction of evolutionary history. To their surprise, they found that the incompleteness itself is actually not such a big issue.
It’s as if you are missing half of a movie. If you are missing the second half, you can’t understand the story, but if you are missing every second frame, you can still follow the plot without problems.
The regularity of the gaps, rather than the incompleteness itself, is what determines the reconstruction of evolutionary history. If a lot of data is missing, but the gaps are regular, we could still reconstruct evolutionary history without major problems, but if the gaps get too long and irregular, results are strongly biased.
Niklas Hohmann, lead author
Faculty of Geosciences
Department of Earth Sciences
Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Darwin
Since Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, the incompleteness of the fossil record has been considered problematic for reconstructing evolutionary history from fossils. Darwin feared that the gradual change that his theory predicted would not be recognizable in the fossil record due to all the gaps.
Our results show that this fear is unjustified. We have a good understanding of where the gaps are, how long they are and what causes them. With this geological knowledge, we can reconstruct evolution hundreds of millions of years ago at an unprecedented temporal resolution.
Niklas Hohmann.
Simulations
Computer simulations of geological processes at timescales longer than any historical records can be used to examine the effects of the incompleteness. To that end, Hohmann and his team combined simulations of different modes of evolution with depositions of carbonate strata to examine how well the mode of evolution can be recovered from fossil time series, and how test results vary between different positions in the carbonate platform and multiple stratigraphic architectures generated by different sea level curves.
If Darwin could read the article, he would certainly be relieved: his theory has proven to be robust on the vagaries of the rock record. Deep-time fossil data – however incomplete – supports our understanding of the mode and tempo of evolution.
Niklas Hohmann.
Article
Hohmann, Niklas; Koelewijn, Joël R.; Burgess, Peter; Jarochowska, Emilia Identification of the mode of evolution in incomplete carbonate successionsBMC Ecology and Evolution24, 113 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-024-02287-2
Abstract
Background
The fossil record provides the unique opportunity to observe evolution over millions of years, but is known to be incomplete. While incompleteness varies spatially and is hard to estimate for empirical sections, computer simulations of geological processes can be used to examine the effects of the incompleteness in silico.
We combine simulations of different modes of evolution (stasis, (un)biased random walks) with deposition of carbonate platforms strata to examine how well the mode of evolution can be recovered from fossil time series, and how test results vary between different positions in the carbonate platform and multiple stratigraphic architectures generated by different sea level curves.
Results
Stratigraphic architecture and position along an onshore-offshore gradient has only a small influence on the mode of evolution recovered by statistical tests. For simulations of random walks, support for the correct mode decreases with time series length.
Visual examination of trait evolution in lineages shows that rather than stratigraphic incompleteness, maximum hiatus duration determines how much fossil time series differ from the original evolutionary process. Gradual directional evolution is more susceptible to stratigraphic effects, turning it into punctuated evolution. In contrast, stasis remains unaffected.
Conclusions
Fossil time series favor the recognition of both stasis and complex, punctuated modes of evolution.
Not stratigraphic incompleteness, but the presence of rare, prolonged gaps has the largest effect on trait evolution. This suggests that incomplete sections with regular hiatus frequency and durations can potentially preserve evolutionary history without major biases. Understanding external controls on stratigraphic architectures such as sea level fluctuations is crucial for distinguishing between stratigraphic effects and genuine evolutionary process.
Introduction
The fossil record as source of information
Fossils provide a unique record of evolution on temporal and spatial scales not accessible to experimentation or direct human observation [23, 24]. Geological records have delivered fossil time series crucial in formulating and testing hypotheses on evolutionary dynamics and mechanisms of speciation spanning micro- to macroevolutionary scales (e.g., [3, 22, 87, 92]). Nevertheless, fossils remain underused in evolutionary biology. Their main application is still node and tip calibration of molecular clocks, which commonly relies on single occurrences or on assumptions about the probability of finding a fossil rather than stratigraphic data [17]. It is also subject to biases resulting from this small sample size [84]. The unique type of information contained in a fossil succession sampled over a long time interval is rarely exploited, likely due to the following barriers:
The fossil record, being a part of the stratigraphic record, is patchy and distorted. At the time when Darwin [15] discussed this as a major limitation for the testing and development of the theory of evolution, little geological knowledge was present to elucidate the rules governing this incompleteness. Darwin’s concern widely persists (e.g., Patterson [73]), albeit mostly implicitly: most phylogenetic analyses published today do not use fossils which would have been relevant or use only a small fraction of them. Stratigraphy and sedimentology, which can provide relevant data on fossils and the constraints on their occurrence and sampling [46, 56], are jargon-laden, highly atomized disciplines whose utility for evolutionary biology is not obvious to biologists. Biostratigraphy, which uses fossils to establish the relative age of rocks and has amassed datasets that would be of high utility for evolutionary studies, employs taxonomic concepts that are often impractical for or incompatible with evolutionary questions [19, 20, 33, 75]. As a results, scientific communities studying evolution and the fossil record function in parallel, with limited exchange [30].
There is a lack of methodological frameworks to incorporate fossils in their stratigraphic context in evolutionary studies. Historically, phylogenetic methods rarely incorporated geological information such as the relative order of appearance of taxa or specimens in the fossil record, which is the main subject of biostratigraphy [100]. This has led to radical discrepancies between the outcomes of phylogenetic and stratigraphic, or stratophenetic, approaches [26, 18, 22]. This barrier is gradually overcome by methodological advances, such as the Fossilized Birth-Death Model [85], which allows incorporation of parameters specific to the fossil record, such as fossilization rate, sampling probability and age uncertainties of fossil occurrences [5, 6, 95, 101].
Recently, there is renewed appreciation for the importance of fossils in phylogenetic reconstructions [31, 70, 71, 80]. These studies focus on the role of the morphological information provided by extinct taxa, but less on what a modern understanding of the physical structure of the geological record contributes to reconstructing evolutionary processes from fossil-bearing stratigraphic successions.
Stratigraphic incompleteness and age-depth models
The incompleteness of the fossil record serves as an umbrella term for different effects that diminish the information content of the rock record, ranging from taphonomic effects and sampling biases to the role of gaps and erosion [56]. Here we focus on the role of gaps (hiatuses) in the rock record. Such gaps can arise due to sedimentation (including fossils) and subsequent erosion or lack of creation of rocks in the first place, e.g., when an environment remains barren of sediment formation or supply for a long time. Both processes result in gaps in the rock record and, as a result, in the fossil record. This type of incompleteness is termed stratigraphic (in)completeness, defined as the time (not) recorded in a section, divided by the total duration of the section [16, 88]. Stratigraphic completeness provides an upper limit on the proportion of evolutionary history that can be recovered from a specified section, even with unlimited resources and perfect preservation of fossils. Stratigraphic completeness is difficult to quantify in geological sections, and estimates range between 3 and 30% [98], suggesting that more than 70% of evolutionary history is either not recorded in the first place or destroyed at a later time.
Fossils older than a 1.5 million years cannot be dated directly, and their age has to be inferred from circumstantial evidence on the age of the strata in which they were found [56, 97]. This inference is formalized by age-depth models (ADMs), which serve as coordinate transformations between the stratigraphic domain, where the fossils were found (length dimension L, SI unit meter), and the time domain (time dimension T, SI unit seconds - we use the derived units years, kyrs, or Myrs) [37]. Age-depth models are always explicitly or implicitly used when fossil data is used for evolutionary inferences. Because they convey how positions of fossils relate to their age, ADMs are the basis for calculating evolutionary rates. As a result, revising ADMs commonly leads to a revision of evolutionary rates. For example, Malmgren, Berggren, and Lohmann [64] observed increased rates of morphological evolution in lineages of fossil foraminifera over a geologically short time interval of 0.6 Myr and proposed that this “punctuated gradualism” may be a “common norm for evolution”. MacLeod [63] revised the age-depth model and showed that the interval with increased rates of evolution coincides with a stratigraphically condensed interval, i.e., more change is recorded in a thinner rock unit. Re-evaluating the evolutionary history based on the revised age-depth model removed the apparent punctuation and showed that morphological evolution in that case had been gradual rather than punctuated.
Age-depth models contain information on both variations in sediment accumulation rate and gaps in the stratigraphic and - as a result – the fossil record. For example, stratigraphic completeness corresponds to the fraction of the time domain to which an age-depth model assigns a stratigraphic position. In the absence of an age-depth model, we can only make statements on the ordering of evolutionary events, but not on the temporal rates involved.
Forward models of stratigraphic architectures
Forward computer simulations of sedimentary strata provide a useful tool to study the effects of incompleteness and heterogeneous stratigraphic architectures. They have demonstrated that locations and frequency of gaps in the stratigraphic record are not random, but a predictable result of external controls, such as fluctuations in eustatic sea level [12, 67, 96].
Combined with biological models, forward models provide a powerful tool to test hypotheses on the effects of stratigraphic architectures on our interpretations of evolutionary history. For example, Hannisdal [32] combined simulations of a siliciclastic basin with models of taphonomy and phenotypic evolution. The results showed that when sample sizes are small, morphological evolution will appear as stasis regardless of the underlying mode. This might explain why stasis is the most common evolutionary pattern recovered from the fossil record [45].
Stratigraphic incompleteness and variations in sediment accumulation rates introduce multiple methodological challenges. Constructing complex ADMs requires sedimentological and stratigraphic expert knowledge, and they will potentially be associated with large uncertainties. Even in the “perfect knowledge” scenario where the age-depth model is fully known, evolutionary history in the time domain will inevitably be sampled irregularly: If two samples are separated by a hiatus, their age difference must be at least the duration of the hiatus, which might be millions of years. On the other hand, if sediment accumulation is rapid and no hiatuses are present, the age difference between samples might be only a few days.
Most studies “translate” fossil successions into time series using age-depth models based on simplified assumptions on the regularity of the stratigraphic record. These ADMs ignore stratigraphic incompleteness and often assume uninterrupted constant sediment accumulation (UCSA). This assumption implies that stratigraphic completeness is 100%, rock thickness is proportional to time passed, and linear interpolation between tie points of known age can be used to infer fossil ages from their positions. Such ADMs are usually used implicitly, without discussing their limitations. While the assumption of UCSA is sedimentologically and stratigraphically unrealistic, it brings strong methodological simplifications. For example, if distance between samples collected in a rock section is kept constant, UCSA implies that the underlying evolutionary history in the time domain is sampled at a constant frequency, the generated fossil time series are equidistant in time and can therefore be analyzed by standard methods of time series analysis [7, 45].
Objectives and hypotheses
We examine how commonly made simplified assumptions on stratigraphic architectures influence how the mode of evolution is recovered from fossil time series. We use tropical carbonate platforms as a case study, because they host large parts of the fossil record and are evolutionary hotspots [51].
We test the following hypotheses:
The mode of evolution identified in a fossil time series obtained under the assumption of uninterrupted constant sediment accumulation (UCSA) is the same as the mode of the original time series.
Lower stratigraphic completeness reduces the chance of identifying the correct mode of evolution from fossil time series constructed based on the assumption of UCSA [41, 43]. The implication of this hypothesis is that different depositional environments have different chances of preserving the mode of evolution because of systematic differences in their completeness.
[…]
Conclusions
We tested the hypothesis that the commonly employed approach to identifying the mode of evolution in fossil succession, i.e., linear projection of stratigraphic positions of occurrences into the time domain without considering changes in sedimentation rate and gaps in the record, recovers the correct mode of evolution. We found that, although prolonged gaps distorted trait evolution record visually, tests for the mode of evolution were only weakly affected by gaps and irregular age-depth models. Our findings differ from those of Hannisdal [32], who found (using a different approach but asking the same question) that incomplete sampling in the stratigraphic record may result in all other modes of evolution being identified as stasis.
Our findings did not vary substantially between two stratigraphic architectures with varying gap distributions and degrees of stratigraphic completeness. The lack of influence of stratigraphic effects is counterintuitive, as deeper environments are often assumed to be more complete and therefore more suitable for sampling fossil series for evolutionary studies. In the case of undirected random walks, increasing the number of observations (i.e., sampling intensity, length of the fossil series) did not improve the identification of the mode of evolution, but rather worsened it.
Our study was motivated by improving the recovery of evolutionary information from highly resolved fossil successions, particularly at microevolutionary scales. We are convinced that such successions can aliment models and understanding that is not accessible to exclusively neontological methodologies, as illustrated by e.g. [44, 77, 90]. Our contribution is the use of stratigraphic forward modeling to ground-truth the methodologies serving this palaeobiological research program. Forward modeling allows rigorous testing of concerns that the fossil record is too distorted, or too incomplete, to answer (micro)evolutionary questions. They also offer the possibility to evaluate the robustness of identifications of the mode of evolution and estimates of its parameters under different simulated age-depth models. Finally, sedimentological information may aliment age-depth models [36, 52]. The proliferation of ever better stratigraphic forward models (e.g. CarboCAT [12, 67], SedFlux [50], strataR [42], CarboKitten.jl [34]) opens the possibility to validate these methods and improve our understanding of the fossil record.
Fig. 1
Study design for testing the mode of evolution in the stratigraphic domain. Computationally, first sampling positions are determined, then the age-depth model is used to determine the times that correspond to these positions. Last, the trait evolution at said times are simulated. The simulated mean trait values are the values observable at the sampled stratigraphic positions
Fig. 1
The outcome of simulating carbonate platforms in the stratigraphic domain. A Scenario A: deposition based on a fictional sea-level curve. B Scenario B: deposition based on the sea-level curve from Miller et al. [69] for the last 2.58 Myr. Graphs represent the position in the middle of the simulated grid along the strike
In summary, what this study shows is that when computer models are used to predict the course of evolution in a geological column in which what fossils there are show how environmental changes result in morphological changes, the computer prediction of and the fossil record match. This means that temporal gaps in the fossil record can be bridged and that assumptions about what happened in the gap are valid. In other words, the gaps are not a problem for the TOE.
Additionally, since most taxonomic relationships are deduced from multiple strands of evidence, of which the fossil record may or may not feature, the 'gaps' are irrelevant anyway.
So, not only are the 'gaps' not a problem for the TOE, let alone fatal for it, the assumptions we make based on logical deductions are as valid today as they were in Darwin's day. It's clear from his writing that Darwin was more concerned about how opponents of the TOE would misrepresent the gaps in the fossil record than he was about those gaps. From the way creationist frauds fool their dupes about them, it seem Darwin was right to be concerned.
An old story from December 2021, which I somehow missed, is currently being given another airing in the social media, so I'll take this opportunity to make up for my earlier oversight. It is the news that the largest known ancient arthropod was discovered on a Northumberland, UK, beach.
It is interesting not so much because it refuted creationism by living 326 million years before the Universe existed according to creationism, but because it could only have reached that size by living in a high-oxygen environment such as pertained in the Carboniferous Era.
The basic problem with all the arthropods is that they depend on passive diffusion to exchange gasses (oxygen ( and carbon dioxide () with their environment via series of spiracles, so the rate of diffusion is proportional to the concentration of and in the atmosphere. The millipedes partly overcome this limitation by being long and thin.
Tell me all about the giant arthropod, Arthropleura, please.
Arthropleura was a fascinating and enormous prehistoric arthropod that lived during the Carboniferous Period, approximately 315 to 299 million years ago. It is one of the largest-known land-dwelling invertebrates ever to have existed, and it is often compared to modern-day millipedes due to its segmented, elongated body.
Physical Description
Arthropleura was a colossal creature, with some estimates suggesting it could reach lengths of up to 2.5 meters (about 8 feet) or more. Its body was composed of numerous jointed segments, each covered by a pair of armor-like plates called tergites. These segments gave Arthropleura a ribbed appearance and allowed it to move with surprising agility for its size. Unlike modern millipedes, which have numerous legs on each segment, Arthropleura's limbs were relatively small compared to its overall body size, though they were still numerous.
The exoskeleton of Arthropleura was likely made of chitin, a tough, protective material found in the exoskeletons of all arthropods. This exoskeleton provided protection from predators and may have played a role in retaining moisture, which would have been important for surviving in the terrestrial environments of the Carboniferous Period.
Habitat and Lifestyle
Arthropleura thrived in the lush, swampy forests that were prevalent during the Carboniferous Period. These forests were dominated by giant ferns, horsetails, and other primitive plants, which created a humid and oxygen-rich atmosphere. This high oxygen content in the Earth's atmosphere is believed to have been a key factor in allowing Arthropleura and other large arthropods to grow to such enormous sizes.
Arthropleura was likely an herbivore, feeding on the abundant plant material in its environment. Some evidence suggests it might have consumed decaying plant matter rather than live plants, making it more of a detritivore. Its large size would have allowed it to access a variety of food sources, from low-lying vegetation to fallen leaves and other organic debris.
Behavior and Movement
Despite its size, Arthropleura was likely a relatively fast-moving creature, capable of navigating through the dense undergrowth of its forested habitat. Its body structure suggests it moved in a serpentine or undulating manner, using its many legs to propel itself forward.
There is little direct evidence of Arthropleura's behavior, but its size and the structure of its exoskeleton suggest it had few natural predators. It may have relied on its size and the tough armor of its exoskeleton for defense, rather than speed or agility.
Extinction
Arthropleura went extinct at the end of the Carboniferous Period, around 299 million years ago. The reasons for its extinction are not entirely clear, but several factors may have contributed. The drying out of the Earth’s climate, the reduction in atmospheric oxygen levels, and the rise of new predators, such as early reptiles, could have all played a role in its decline.
Fossil Evidence
Fossils of Arthropleura are relatively rare, but they have been found in various parts of the world, including North America and Europe. These fossils usually consist of fragments of the exoskeleton, as the softer parts of the body did not fossilize well. However, trace fossils, such as footprints, have also been discovered, providing valuable information about how this giant arthropod moved and lived.
Significance
Arthropleura is significant not just because of its enormous size, but also because it represents a time when arthropods dominated the Earth’s ecosystems. Its existence during the Carboniferous Period is a testament to the unique environmental conditions of the time, particularly the high oxygen levels that allowed such giant invertebrates to thrive.
In summary, Arthropleura was an extraordinary giant millipede-like arthropod that lived in the Carboniferous forests. Its size, habitat, and extinction provide valuable insights into the evolutionary history of arthropods and the environmental changes that shaped life on Earth millions of years ago.
The fossil was discovered in January 2018, in a large block of sandstone that had fallen from the cliff in Howick Bay in Northumberland. Fortunately the block split open in such a way as to perfectly expose the fossil, where it was spotted by a formed PhD student.
The fossil was painstakingly extracted from the block of sandstone and taken to Cambridge University's Department of Earth Sciences where it was examined by a team led by Neil S Davis. The team’s findings were published in the Journal of the Geological Society and announced in a Cambridge University news release in December, 2021:
Largest-ever fossil millipede found in Northern EnglandThe largest-ever fossil of a giant millipede – as big as a car – has been found on a beach in the north of England.
The fossil – the remains of a creature called Arthropleura – dates from the Carboniferous Period, about 326 million years ago, over 100 million years before the Age of Dinosaurs. The fossil reveals that Arthropleura was the largest-known invertebrate animal of all time, larger than the ancient sea scorpions that were the previous record holders.
The specimen, found on a Northumberland beach about 40 miles north of Newcastle, is made up of multiple articulated exoskeleton segments, broadly similar in form to modern millipedes. It is just the third such fossil ever found. It is also the oldest and largest: the segment is about 75 centimetres long, while the original creature is estimated to have measured around 2.7 metres long and weighed around 50 kilograms. The results are reported in the Journal of the Geological Society.
The fossil was discovered in January 2018 in a large block of sandstone that had fallen from a cliff to the beach at Howick Bay in Northumberland.
It was a complete fluke of a discovery. The way the boulder had fallen, it had cracked open and perfectly exposed the fossil, which one of our former PhD students happened to spot when walking by.
Neil S. Davies, First Author
Department of Earth Sciences
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Unlike the cool and wet weather associated with the region today, Northumberland had a more tropical climate in the Carboniferous Period, when Great Britain lay near the Equator. Invertebrates and early amphibians lived off the scattered vegetation around a series of creeks and rivers. The specimen identified by the researchers was found in a fossilised river channel: it was likely a moulted segment of the Arthropleura’s exoskeleton that filled with sand, preserving it for hundreds of millions of years.
The fossil was extracted in May 2018 with permission from Natural England and the landowners, the Howick Estate.
It was an incredibly exciting find, but the fossil is so large it took four of us to carry it up the cliff face.
Finding these giant millipede fossils is rare, because once they died, their bodies tend to disarticulate, so it’s likely that the fossil is a moulted carapace that the animal shed as it grew. We have not yet found a fossilised head, so it’s difficult to know everything about them.
Neil S. Davies
The fossil was brought back to Cambridge so that it could be examined in detail. It was compared with all previous records and revealed new information about the animal’s habitat and evolution. The animal can be seen to have only existed in places that were once located at the Equator, such as Great Britain during the Carboniferous. Previous reconstructions have suggested that the animal lived in coal swamps, but this specimen showed Arthropleura preferred open woodland habitats near the coast.
There are only two other known Arthropleura fossils, both from Germany, and both much smaller than the new specimen. Although this is the largest Arthropleura fossil skeleton ever found, there is still much to learn about these creatures.
The great size of Arthropleura has previously been attributed to a peak in atmospheric oxygen during the late Carboniferous and Permian periods, but because the new fossil comes from rocks deposited before this peak, it shows that oxygen cannot be the only explanation.
The researchers believe that to get to such a large size, Arthropleura must have had a high-nutrient diet.
While we can’t know for sure what they ate, there were plenty of nutritious nuts and seeds available in the leaf litter at the time, and they may even have been predators that fed off other invertebrates and even small vertebrates such as amphibians
Neil S. Davies
Arthropleura animals crawled around Earth’s equatorial region for around 45 million years, before going extinct during the Permian period. The cause of their extinction is uncertain, but could be due to global warming that made the climate too dry for them to survive, or to the rise of reptiles, who out-competed them for food and soon dominated the same habitats.
The fossil will go on public display at Cambridge’s Sedgwick Museum in the New Year [2022].
Neil Davies is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. The research was supported in part by the Natural Environment Research Council.
The paper in the Journal of the Geological Society is still behind a paywall, so only the abstract is available:
Abstract Arthropleura is a genus of giant myriapods that ranged from the early Carboniferous to Early Permian, with some individuals attaining lengths >2 m. Although most of the known fossils of the genus are disarticulated and occur primarily in late Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian) strata, we report here partially articulated Arthropleura remains from the early Carboniferous Stainmore Formation (Serpukhovian; Pendleian) in the Northumberland Basin of northern England. This 76 × 36 cm specimen represents part of an exuvium and is notable because only two comparably articulated giant Arthropleura fossils are previously known. It represents one of the largest known arthropod fossils and the largest arthropleurid recovered to date, the earliest (Mississippian) body fossil evidence for gigantism in Arthropleura, and the first instance of a giant arthropleurid body fossil within the same regional sedimentary succession as the large arthropod trackway Diplichnites cuithensis. The remains represent 12–14 anterior Arthropleura tergites in the form of a partially sand-filled dorsal exoskeleton. The original organism is estimated to have been 55 cm in width and up to 2.63 m in length, weighing c. 50 kg. The specimen is preserved partially in three dimensions within fine sandstone and has been moderately deformed by synsedimentary tectonics. Despite imperfect preservation, the specimen corroborates the hypothesis that Arthropleura had a tough, sclerotized exoskeleton. Sedimentological evidence for a lower delta plain depositional environment supports the contention that Arthropleura preferentially occupied open woody habitats, rather than swampy environments, and that it shared such habitats with tetrapods. When viewed in the context of all the other global evidence for Arthropleura, the specimen contributes to a dataset that shows the genus had an equatorially restricted palaeogeographical range, achieved gigantism prior to late Paleozoic peaks in atmospheric oxygen, and was relatively unaffected by climatic events in the late Carboniferous, prior to its extinction in the early Permian.
It is, of course, a characteristic of these sorts of finds that they are corroborated by and in turn corroborate several different strands of evidence. Such a large arthropod, given what we know of arthropod respiration, could only have evolved and lived at a time when there was a high level atmospheric and a plentiful supply of nutrient material. This places it in the Carboniferous, in exactly the age of the rock formation in which it was found. This corroborates the theory that the Carboniferous would have been when large arthropods would have existed, given what we know of evolutionary biology.
Although creationists will try to present that as circular reasoning, it is in fact exactly what we would expect because real events involving several different geological, climatological and biological processes have a causal relationship so will always be mutually corroborative, just as the extinction of these organisms will also coincide with geological and climatological changes that caused them.
This is as obvious as the prediction that the formation of lakes and rivers in the Sahara would have been when the climate was wetter and rainfall was higher, and conversely that wetter weather and higher rainfall in the Sahara would have resulted in the formation of lakes and rivers. Not circular; merely corroboratory.
Sadly for creationists, there are no such independent strands of evidence corroborating any of their claims - either magic creation of species without ancestors a few thousand years ago or a global genocidal flood a few thousand years later. In fact, what evidence there is, such as this fossil, utterly refutes creationism, which continues to be not only an evidence-free superstition but an inherited superstition which runs counter to the available evidence.
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